Parallel development of inexpensive computers and the Internet has enabled computer users to easily communicate among themselves and conduct transactions from various geographic locations. These developments have not come without costs.
By way of example, users must often deal with virus-laden computers, never-ending reams of spam, and credit card bills for purchases they did not make. New threats emerge daily and PC-based security and privacy software cannot keep up. Crooks and hackers worldwide continually find ways around typical PC protection and find new ways to compromise online security and privacy. Internet users typically have been victims of online attacks, or will be a victim at some time. The financial cost of managing these problems on an individual basis is considerable, but the cost is overwhelmed by the loss of personal time required to address cleanup after-the-fact.
Prior art systems for Internet users either provide direct access to the Internet or have some mechanism that attempts to create a more secure interface. Systems that provide direct access between client and Internet give rise to the above-noted problems and generally lead to a loss of security. Moreover, these problems also lead to threats of identity theft that is of increasing concern to Internet users. Systems that attempt to create a more secure interface, either directly or indirectly, typically suffer from slower processing time, degradation of quality of content, and general degradation of the deliverable. With the increase in cybercrime and cybernuisance, including phishing, spamming, identity theft, and credit card theft, combined with increasing complexity and size of data transported across the Internet, the existing systems fall woefully and dangerously short.
New browsers, so-called “proxy browsers”, such as Google and SafeCentral, merely create localized privacy, and neither provide anonymous website access nor provide a solution to financial and spam concerns. In the case of SafeCentral, it includes a list of pre-cleared websites that can be accessed, but it does not create a secure interface with those websites.
Other attempts at proxy browser websites do not address financial or spam concerns, and still permit third party content to be loaded onto the user's computer. In addition, content delivery of complex media, such as video or multi-media webpages, is slow and cumbersome. These sites often rely on third party content players, such as RealPlayer, which introduces another potential for risk instead of eliminating potential risk sources.
Other attempts to address the security and speed combination are through the use of anonymous networks. However, these networks essentially rely on the user's neighbor's connectivity and opaqueness. Most importantly, these solutions still bring website content onto the user's computer.
A range of off-the-shelf Internet security software packages are available to consumers, such as Norton, SpamFighter, McAfee products, and Mightykey. However, most users even today have difficulty not only navigating through the host of mediocre choices, but also navigating through the user manual and the first few months of getting used to using the new software. Furthermore, these software products typically only address static filtering of information coming from websites, and do not protect users from identity theft and other fraud that may occur when conducting purchasing or similar transactions on the Internet.
In addition, existing systems for secure access to the Internet process multiple, simultaneous requests sent through a browser linearly, i.e., processing each information packet as it arrives without regard for the information type, client priority, or any other type of prioritization criteria. This results in slow, frustrating processing times which induce user's to bypass the systems and defeat the purpose of having such software in place.
In a prior art system, as shown in FIG. 1, services are offered to provide web proxy servers, e-mail/online-identification services, a service for storing and recalling user input to forms on associated websites, and services providing fraud protection for purchases on the Internet. However, the utility of such systems is greatly limited by the diversity of the interfaces and system implementations.
Web proxy servers, such as Squid, exist as a buffer between browsers that are installed on a user's computer, and the Internet that the user searches. These proxy servers can cache incoming content, reuse content requested by one client for delivery to another client, and present a single IP address to Internet servers that they communicate with, effectively hiding the source IP address.
Such a proxy system is manually configured for use in each browser, on each machine, and in each location (e.g., home or office). Such proxy configurations are a function of the system administration of the network that the client is attached to and client configuration of the specific client. Thus, the proxying service does not belong to the end-user, and thus cannot be utilized wherever the end-user needs it (e.g., browsing kiosk, Internet Cafè, etc.).
Public access e-mail systems exist that allow end-users to create a new address that is not clearly associated with other information about themselves. For example, the Yahoo! mail is a free system provided by Yahoo!, yet the process requires end-users to create the e-mail address by choosing an address that has not been chosen before, create a password for accessing the e-mail, and then configure the individual mail clients on her various systems to read e-mail sent to that address. Other systems have addressed the difficulty of creating many addresses by allowing the end-user to create an address matching a specific template, and then subsequently receive new e-mails at that address.
For example, Google GMail™ system attempts to “pre-filter” a user's mail such that the user can successfully hide their “real” e-mail address from entities that require a one-way notification address. Because the addresses on the Google system are built in template fashion, the original e-mail address can easily be derived, and the goal of anonymity is lost. More specifically, the Google GMail™ system allows users to create ad-hoc addresses, but those addresses do not provide anonymity. For example, users may simply add a plus sign (+) and other characters to the end of their existing e-mail account name in order to receive e-mails at this new address. Thus, the e-mail address account harrysmith@gmail.com will receive e-mails for harrysmith+macys@gmail.com, harrysmith+sears@gmail.com, and harrysmith+sierra@gmail.com. Obviously, the original e-mail account is trivial to derive from these ad-hoc addresses.
Existing web browsers may include a system and method of remembering the values that an end-user has inputted on various forms at different sites on the Internet, as shown in FIG. 2. This form-filling function adds a valued convenience to the end-user while entering information on a website. The data utilized for form-filling belongs to a specific instance of the web browser. Thus, the values that the end-user has filled out on her Internet Explorer™ browser at home, is not available for reuse on her Safari™ browser at work.
Debit card fraud protection for online transactions exists in differing forms today. The existing solutions rely on the card issuer to generate new one-time numbers (“OTN”) (for example, VISA™ ShopSafe), or the user to generate OTNs (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,908,030). The systems are disconnected from the process of goods and/or service selection, and require users to stop shopping in order to perform a payment process. Other solutions rely on the merchant to have special knowledge of the process (for example, PayPal™), and thus can only be used at a limited number of merchants (i.e., those that have signed up with the issuer's process).
Web Proxy servers do not prevent raw content from arriving at the client system. The client system is responsible for virus protection and for fine-grained content filtering. In addition, existing browser systems employ a plug-in model, which relies upon third-party software to execute and/or visualize the content fetched from the Internet. Such plug-ins may contain bugs, or be vulnerable to virus attacks, and are not under the control of the invoking browser system. Thus, the user's browser is simply a conduit between Internet content and third-party software. Because the browser is not a firewall (by definition), it allows Internet content to be directly executed on the end-user's computer.
Form-filling is the term used to describe the automated suggestion or full-in technique employed by existing browsers when the end-user is presented with a form. But, as was pointed out earlier, the information about those forms is specific to the instance of the browser that is running. If a user fills out a form on her home machine, the values she entered are not available for use on her office machine, or at the airport Internet kiosk. The same is true of any “cookies” that she has stored while browsing, her browsing history, and her bookmarks and annotation for websites she has visited.
Debit card transactions on the Internet are an important part of e-commerce. However, current systems are fraught with fraud, causing large losses to the credit card industry, and major inconvenience to the end-user. Existing systems that attempt to lower the possibility of fraud are inconvenient for end-users, who are generally motivated only by convenience, because their fraudulent transactions are paid for by the defrauded merchants. Such systems have difficulty gaining traction.
Thus, there remains a need for a system that provides a secure Internet connection for a user, both outgoing (user-to-Internet), and incoming (Internet-to-user).